A wedding necklace (thāli or tāli) instead of a wedding ring; an auspiciously blessed marriage mat (mukūrttam); a tonsure or topknot (kūdūmi, also known as sikha); a forehead mark (tilak or bindi; or kūmūm); use of a palanquin, white horse, and/or parasol (chatra) in a ritual procession; clarified butter (ghee) and raw sugar (ghur), honey, coconut, or some other food for a customary celebration; ingesting a ritually “cooling” or “heating” substance; sitting cross-legged for worship or prayer; maintaining a dual identity, using both a “Christian” and a “Hindu” name; taking communion only with one's right hand; “mother-tongue” worship versus Latin, Syro-Malabari (Syriac) or Sanskriti rites: the list of cultural and social issues, with controversial religious or ritual overtones, among hundreds of Christians communities of India, seems endless.
Christian worship, ever capable of transcending cultural barriers, has never been confined to one culture. It certainly is not bound by patterns imposed from Europe. No one culture or language is, in itself, sacred. All possess a potential of becoming so, to a greater or lesser degree. Christian cultures of India, with their norms or rituals, are not mere instances of “legitimization,” or “recognition,” by alien Christians from the West. Rather, each reflects an instance of the “indigenous discovery of Christianity” by one among manifold Indian peoples, for themselves. Hence, each attempt to understand Christianity in India requires judicious deference and humility, especially for anyone coming from outside India. It takes a special temerity for such a person to explain “Christian inculturation” in India. Even someone reared within India cannot fully “represent” all that is India, since no one person holds a cultural and linguistic grasp of the subcontinent's peoples as a whole, so as to totally comprehend the cultural ethos and understandings of the thousands of separate communities that make up the pluralism we know as “India.” Since Christianity itself has no fixed or universal cultural, linguistic, or geographic center point, its ecumenism is always pluralistic, with only God at its center.
The book under review, purporting to examine Christian norms within Indian cultural contexts—as manifest in critiques of architecture, liturgy, and ritual—is not clear, simple, or straightforward. Readers, struggling with abstract and ambiguous verbiage surrounding highly complex processes of contextualization, may well become lost in its technical circumlocution and obfuscation. The author attempts to combine fashionable “discourse analysis” with fashionable “dialogue” in order to find common ground among hundreds of extremely different Christian communities of India, all of which, in one way or another, he declares to have been victimized by “colonialism” and all of which, therefore, struggle with controversies over what ought or ought not to be appropriately seen as “Christian” practice, ritual, or worship.
Nowhere is this study more weak than in historical understandings. At once dated, simplistic, and stereotypically Eurocentric, these do damage to the entire work. One quotation (16, last paragraph) serves to exemplify this hiatus:
Whether intentionally or otherwise, through these missionary processes Christianity becomes a Western commodity imported into India, and other places similarly evangelized. The Western colonists exported the raw materials they sought, and imported Christianity, alongside other European cultural practices (e.g. bureaucracy and democracy). Christianity was thus deeply embroiled in the exchange of commodities which imperialism entails. It is from this context that the task of inculturation emerges, and it may easily be perceived that any attempt to redress the balance of cultural expression can itself potentially become subject to the pitfall of commodification. This remains an on-going issue which did not end with colonial occupation.
Just a few relevant facts: Local merchant-lords first invited servants of the East India Company to build a station in India (1639); the gold title-deed (sāsanam) sanctioning the “city-state” of Madras was ratified by the emperor, Sri Ranga Raya III; the gold coin (hūn, also known as pagoda) used as specie for this joint venture and its emerging empire was minted within the huge temple of SriVenkateshwara; “commodities” exported to Europe were not raw materials, but bolts of highly finished textiles (chintz, calico, muslin, and so forth) that, in due course, transformed the apparel of Europe; and, finally, the Raj, founded on Indian manpower, money, and methods, relied on a standing army of up to 300,000 high-caste infantry and cavalry (sepoys, sawars, et cetera) and a bureaucracy of as many high-caste (Brahman, and others) civil servants. Since this Raj maintained hundreds of thousands of temple endowments, festivals, and ceremonies, its European officials vehemently opposed allowing European Christian missionaries into its territories. Attempts to eradicate “heathen” practices and rituals over which this “Hindu” Raj stood guard were firmly rebuffed. Since not one single mass movement to Christianity was ever led by a European missionary but, rather, was always led by Indian Christians, the idea that Christianity in India was, in a major sense, “imported” or “alien” or “colonial” is open to question.
The term “inculturation” itself is not clearly defined. Is inculturation merely some sort of autonomous changing of an already existing culture—a special kind of cultural hybridity—constructed, in varying degrees, for different Indian Christian communities by themselves? Is it an inevitable, somewhat mindless or spontaneous process that is beyond human control? Or is it an ecclesiastical policy that is to be implemented by church authorities and worldwide ecumenical institutions? Apparently, the latter definition seems favored; and, apparently, this is a good thing. Even so, does not inculturation-as-policy contradict and, indeed, scorn the capacity of Indian Christians to shape their own faith and their own rituals of worship? Inculturation coming out of decisions and discussions of the World Council of Churches, Vatican II, and Lambeth Conferences seems little more than another futile importation, if not a neo-colonial imposition. Christianity in India has always been, predominantly and profoundly, Indian. Books like this notwithstanding, its manifold cultures seem quite likely to remain so.
